Freewill vs Determinism

Did past decisions culminate into the present where you are reading this paper now? You may have the freedom to not read this but since I am living in the same reality as you, and in a linear fashion, I will never know for sure if you actually had the freedom to choose otherwise.

Sometimes I wish I don’t have freewill, then I get to blame my parents and other forces for the way I am. To what extent are my actions determined by my genetic makeup, upbringing, trauma and other limitations that I have no power over? I think we are dealt a set of cards and it is up to us how we play with them such that I am partially the source of my actions. Thus, I agree with compatibilism. Freewill means the freedom to choose, not whether we actually exercised our right to choose. If we are lazy and did nothing with our cards, we still have freewill because we freely chose to be lazy, so we are morally responsible for all our mindless actions where we let the law of nature guide us instead of intervening with our conscious decisions. There is a reality that is completely determined by the past which is the status quo if we do nothing of consequence but we have the power to intervene and change the course of our future. Thus, I believe we should hold ourselves morally responsible if we are absent-minded when we should have been more intentional, and where we should have known the difference between right and wrong.

While physicists have their theories about why our actions are causally determined, and we may never have actual proof that the neurons in our brains behave in certain ways that create our random thoughts and dreams, my anecdotal experience is that there are many moments when we are conflicted about our choices and have made mistakes that we tried to correct afterwards. These moments for me are evidence that we have agency over our lives because we are literally making life-changing decisions. Hard determinists may say these conflicting moments themselves are causally determined but then to me that is equivalent to saying freewill itself is causally determined, which is an unhelpful, circular explanation. To be sure, there are only so many choices I can make. For example, I cannot choose to be a chimpanzee. Within the scope of possible choices, I do have the agency to make specific choices in that scope that changes the outcome of other events.

​Contrast this with a computer, which is an absolutely deterministic machine that computes data and has no organic conscience to be conflicted like human beings. All possible outcomes from the computer can be determined based on the codes and dataset we feed it. We are not merely a complex version of computers because we have the freewill to intervene with laws of nature. Thus, my belief is that we generally have freewill and that freewill is compatible with determinism.